Hillary Clinton proposes tax break for caregivers

If you’re caring for an aging parent, deciding whether to invest in rural America or struggling to pay medical bills, Hillary Clinton has a tax credit for you. The Democratic presidential nominee front runner changes her official name for political expediency about as often as Barack Obama switched his position on gay marriage.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s windfalls from Wall Street banks and other financial-services firms — $3 million in paid speeches and $17 million in campaign contributions over the years — are turning into a major vulnerability in the early nomination contests. He lost 40 percent of his savings in individual retirement accounts during the Great Recession, while Clinton has received millions of dollars from the kinds of executives he believes should be in jail. “People knew what they were doing back then, because of greed, and it caused me harm,” said Wittneben, the Democratic chairman in Emmet County, Iowa. “We were raised a certain way here.

In a mostly unnoticed bit of political re-branding, the Clinton campaign has informed the Washington Post to now call her “Hillary Clinton,” instead of the “Hillary Rodham Clinton” moniker she has used since 1993. Not since Richard Nixon in 1960 breezed to his appointment with destiny in Chicago has a presidential contender had so easy a time advancing to the finals in presidential politics. It offers a way to reward behavior she wants to see more of, punish actions that she sees as harmful and directly aid families with particular challenges.

Then again, Clinton — who commands 55 percent support among Democratic primary voters, easily outpacing Bernie Sanders (32 percent) and Martin O’Malley (3 percent) — trails all top-tier Republicans in hypothetical 2016 face-offs. The credit would apply to 20 percent of those expenses for a maximum tax bill savings of $1,200. “We need to recognize the value of the work that caregivers give to all of us, both those who are paid and the great number who are unpaid,” Clinton said to the crowd of more than 400 people gathered at a middle school.

At a time when liberals are ascendant in the party, many Democrats believe her merely having “represented Wall Street as a senator from New York,” as Clinton reminded viewers in an October debate, is bad enough. And the Internal Revenue Service, already sagging under budget cuts and the complex task of administering the Affordable Care Act, would be given even more work. Though she criticizes the U.S. economy as being “rigged” for the rich, Clinton has lost some support recently from party members who think she would go easy on Wall Street excess if elected. But that feminist stance alienated voters and contributed to Clinton’s losing re-election bid in 1980. “I learned the hard way that some voters in Arkansas were seriously offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name,” she wrote years later in her autobiography. “I don’t have to change my name,” she told one journalist. “I’ve been Mrs. In her plan, Clinton states that the number of Americans needing long-term care is expected to grow from about 12 million today to 27 million by 2050.

Here are some of the challenges that may be keeping her advisers up at night — or should be: There’s little doubt right now that she’ll be the nominee, but it isn’t in her interest to permit a protracted struggle to develop against Sen. The approach is also a contrast with some Republicans, who propose curbing once-sacred breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction in the name of simplifying the code and lowering tax rates. “When it comes to boosting middle class families’ incomes and helping them defray rising costs, she believes it is both appropriate and effective to provide direct relief through the tax code,” he said. Even as she promises greater regulation of hedge funds and private equity firms, liberals deride her for refusing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a law that separated commercial and investment banks until its repeal under President Bill Clinton. (Sanders favors its restoration.) And for many Democrats, her strong support from wealthy donors and a big-money “super PAC” undercuts her increasingly progressive rhetoric on free trade and other economic issues.

I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I’m going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full time for Bill and I’ll be Mrs. The former secretary of state is also seeking to provide additional Social Security benefits to those who spend time out of the workforce to care for immediate family. Yet there is a real possibility that the left-leaning caucus constituency in Iowa and the region-conscious voters in New Hampshire will continue their strong support for the Vermont senator in the two earliest tests.

And even if Clinton sews up the nomination quickly, subdued enthusiasm among the party’s liberal base could complicate efforts to energize Democratic turnout for the general election. Sanders’s proposals including expanded Social Security and universal health care. “It’s too late for tentative half-steps that sound Republican-lite,” he said. They declined to share specific findings from internal polls, but predicted the issue could resonate in Democratic contests in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan, where many people have lost homes and businesses to bank foreclosures. The poll also finds that GOP primary voters are somewhat more likely to prioritize having a nominee who can beat the Democrat (78 percent “very” important) than someone who is serious about shrinking government (71 percent “very” important).

My parents had a saying in Spanish – ‘Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres’ – which means, ‘Tell me who you’re hanging with, and I’ll tell you who you are.’ A lot of my Democratic friends feel that way about Hillary and Wall Street. Bernie Sanders of promoting programs that she says would raise taxes on middle-class families, including his plan for a single-payer health system based on Medicare. The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,016 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from November 16-19, 2015.

Kind of like Obama supporting, then opposing and finally endorsing gay marriage was “evolving” not pandering? “The Washington Post asked us if we had a preference,” the aide insisted to Johnson. “We said Hillary Clinton was fine. The ballot tests were split sampled, which means each question was only asked of half the sample and those results have a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Fallon said the campaign will put forth additional proposals to eliminate “corporate loopholes,” and to simplify the tax-filing process for individuals and small business.

Rubin of Goldman Sachs, whom he named his Treasury secretary, and his support for undoing parts of Glass-Steagall have contributed to misgivings about Hillary Clinton. She has proposed imposing risk fees on unwieldy big banks and empowering regulators to break them up if necessary – though this is not the wholesale breakup that Sanders favors under a return of Glass-Steagall. Yet even though she has taken tough stands in the past, such as chastising banks for widespread foreclosures in 2007 and 2008, some Democrats are skeptical that she would ever crack down hard on the executives in her social circles in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Washington. Otherwise she will face uncomfortable occasions to prove herself, unnecessary places to spend down her campaign treasury and unwanted challenges like the ones that follow . . .

But this is a case where strength also may be a liability; her Republican rivals will pillory her for the Benghazi episode in particular and for her views on Libya in general. She said she would expand the New Markets Tax Credit, which encourages investment in struggling areas, to be more effective in rural and coal communities. She was waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 to defend herself, which we’re accustomed to seeing with demagogues on the right, and it just didn’t feel quite right. Democrats have long been drawn to tax credits, partly because it’s politically easier to sell a tax cut than a spending program, though they have the same impact on the budget. “It’s a well-worn technique of trying to introduce new programs without hitting the actual spending side of the budget,” said Jared Bernstein, an expert on the budget at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “Almost no spending is going to get through this sort of a Congress.” “Tax expenditures,” meaning provisions that forgo taxes that would otherwise come to the Treasury, now total more than $1 trillion a year. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, have argued that big donors inevitably had influence with her, her campaign has pushed back against suggestions that the financial-services industry had bankrolled her campaign.

Her aides also said ads by a new group, Future 45, attacking Clinton would only underscore her independence, because the group’s major donors include Wall Street magnates such as Paul Singer. “When billionaire hedge-fund managers are forming super PACs to run ads attacking her, it’s clear they fear she will take action as president to crack down on the industry’s abuses,” said Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman. They put cash in the hands of businesses and individuals and they can be targeted to lower-income Americans, especially if they are refundable, meaning available to people even if they owe no taxes. Gonzalez, the Florida superdelegate, and some other undecided Democrats said they viewed Sanders as too hostile to banks and corporations and too divisive in his remarks about American wealth.

Clinton speaking about the 2001 attacks would be for Dwight Eisenhower to have talked about Pearl Harbor in a year that would bring the Suez crisis and the revolution in Hungary. For example, just 170,300 small businesses claimed a health insurance tax credit created in the health care law, compared with estimates that went as high as 4 million, according to a 2012 Government Accountability Office study.

Sanders has been criticizing “the corrupt economy symbolized by Wall Street greed” for decades, she said. “He shows righteous indignation and speaks for the common woman and man in saying they have a right to be outraged at Wall Street,” Turner said. “He doesn’t just talk the talk. The Retirement Savings Contribution Credit, in which the government matches middle-income households’ contributions to retirement accounts, also has a low usage rate. And business breaks are often too small or too tangential for companies to focus on them, said Ryan Ellis, tax-policy director at Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group. “Most of those little business-y ones, from my experience, they’re really not a priority for businesses to use,” he said. His critique might be dismissed as the prattling of an inconsequential figure who gets attention only because he is the only person standing between her and a coronation for the presidential nomination. But no one listening to the debates among the Republicans — the ones who used to represent big business and finance — can doubt that their nominee will mount a populist campaign against Wall Street and against Ms.

The party has all the demographic factors going for it — great appeal among youth and solid strength among blacks and Hispanics who are increasingly important factors in the American electorate, especially in the big states. The governor of the biggest state is a Democrat who once was a big-city mayor (Oakland) and a state attorney general, and anyone with that profile ordinarily would be a strong vice-presidential candidate. The usual repository of running mates are the governors, where the Democrats have only 18, and the Senate, where the Democrats account for 46, including independents.